Filtering in search engines

Abstract

In an embodiment, the size of a filter in a search engine is dynamically adjusted in order to reduce filter error. The filter, for example, may be a domain filter that contains domain(s) of preferred search results. A search engine processes the query and the domain filter to create a set of search results that are relevant to the query terms and for which a selected portion of the search results satisfy the domain filter, in that such portion of the documents comes from domains in the filter. The search results may then be provided to the user, as a set of search results that are relevant to the query terms and which include some portion of results that match the query labels. The construction of the domain filter may be done with a Bloom filter approach, using domain prefixes from annotations.

Description

BACKGROUND[0001]1. Field of the Invention[0002]The present invention in general relates to search engines.[0003]2. Related Art[0004]The development of information retrieval systems has predominantly focused on improving the overall quality of the search results presented to the user. The quality of the results has typically been measured in terms of accuracy, recall, or other quantifiable measures of performance. Information retrieval systems, or ‘search engines’ in the context of the Internet and World Wide Web, use different techniques to improve the quality and usefulness of the search results. These techniques may address certain aspects of search engine design such as basic indexing algorithms and document presentation.[0005]An inherent problem in the design of search engines is that the relevance of search results to a particular user depends on factors that are highly dependent on the user's intent in conducting the search, that is, why they are conducting the search, as well...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0010]The present invention relates to systems and methods for improved filtering in search engines. In embodiments of this invention, the quality of search results is improved through filtering of search results using dynamic adjustment of domain filter size to minimize filter error.

Problems solved by technology

The Bloom filter may have a small false positive rate, and thus the search results may contain documents that come from the domains that match the query labels, but which themselves do not satisfy the complete URL pattern for an annotation.

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